Jazz … with the FT: Mike Figgis
Mike Figgis plays a number of instruments, including the piano, guitar and trumpet
The invitation to “bring your instrument” to my meeting with film director and composer Mike Figgis didn’t present me with much of a dilemma: I only play tenor sax. Figgis, though, owns three trumpets, half a dozen guitars and a grand piano, and plays them all. just as well we were meeting at his flat.
Figgis’s back catalogue is an eclectic mix of mainstream success – the Richard Gere vehicle Internal Affairs, Leaving Las Vegas with Nicolas Cage – and full-on experimental adventures in both music and film. next week he is curating a sprawling multimedia provocation, just tell the Truth, at the Royal Opera House.
The free-flowing, ad hoc possibilities of that event prompted Figgis’s suggestion that we try a little improvisation ourselves, at his apartment in London’s King’s Cross. A grand piano is strewn with sheet music, amplification is at the ready and electric guitars wait to be plugged in. Figgis practises regularly – classical music on acoustic guitar, jazz on one of his three trumpets. He takes a pocket trumpet with him when travelling.
Before going to Hollywood, Figgis was a musician, and it is from music that everything springs. his father, a pilot during the war, was an amateur jazz pianist with a large collection of 78s – Art Tatum and Billie Holiday were favourites. “He taught me how to listen to a rhythm section,” said Figgis. “He’d play records and ask me questions like ‘who do you think the drummer is?’”
The family moved to Newcastle upon Tyne when Figgis was eight. at secondary school his English teacher was the trumpeter Ian Carr (who later formed the band Nucleus) and he was taught art by Johnny Walters, another trumpet player. Walters was an early member of the Alan Price Set, the band Price formed when he left the Animals. Figgis started on drums, switched to trumpet, perhaps inevitably, and by his mid-teens he was playing in local bands. Covers of Herb Alpert and the Beatles came first, and then soul, jazz and psychedelia with a band called Gas Board. Its lead singer was one Bryan Ferry.
The director plays his guitar
In 1967, Figgis moved to London, where he studied music and joined the People Band, the house band of the experimental theatre co-operative the People Show. Band and Show split acrimoniously in 1970, but Figgis decided to stay with the theatre company. He then learnt the full range of theatre skills, including direction and eventually film-making. by 1980 he formed his own multimedia production company.
Music remains central to his work, and it is here that he worked out the tension between structure and improvisation, and the management of a creative group.
Our duet would not require anything as grand, more a couple of pointers. Figgis chose to play flugelhorn to blend with my tenor sax; free seemed the best way to go, and the blues an obvious starter. Figgis’s films tend to get labelled grainy and gritty, but his first phrase on flugelhorn was almost romantic in its lyricism. I guessed at the key, and we settled into a comfortable zone of swapped melodies, ad-libbed harmonies and long-held notes.
Free improvisation has its own dynamics, and as we grew in confidence, we fractured into cat-and-mouse scurries, swapped runs and supported each other with impromptu riffs. at one point we executed exactly the same idea at exactly the same time, as though it was pre-composed. A few long notes seemed to round it off, Figgis moved to a minor key, and we ended on a whispered note. Figgis believes that internal dynamics like this can be applied across performance. He referred to Charles Mingus who, he said, “created an environment that’s interesting to improvise in, showed some direction and then left the musicians alone to flourish. It’s really about ‘are you a catalyst?’”
Figgis and Hobart swap melodies
It turned out we had places and people in common. I had played with two long-term Figgis associates, the singers Phil Minton and Maggie Nicols. and as on-the-road musicians at around the same time we had both played the same clubs – Newcastle’s Dolce Vita captures the tone.
The north-east remained important to Figgis. his first full-length feature, 1988’s Stormy Monday, was a grimy thriller set in a Newcastle jazz club. “Funnily enough,” he said, referring to the renaissance of the city’s waterfront, “a scene that I created in what was then derelict dockside now looks like the film.” Stormy Monday, which took its name from a classic T Bone Walker blues, starred Sting as the bass-playing club-owner, and featured the People Band as the avant-garde Krakow Jazz Ensemble.
Figgis has overseen the music for all his films – his scores range from the orchestral, self-penned one Night Stand to the heavily improvised. “I’d show them (the musicians) a scene and I’d just lay down a bed, a bass line or something and I’d say you want to just play on top of that.” in this way he met the creative cream of LA and London’s session musicians, including the saxophonist Peter King, who plays on his film Timecode.
Figgis’s Hollywood stint brought best director and screenplay Oscar nominations for Leaving Las Vegas. He also branched out into documentaries and began working with digital film. He quit Hollywood in 2003 – “I got fairly beaten up by the studio trying to make films they didn’t want to make, and trying to put music on them they didn’t want to hear.”
New technology has given Figgis more control over editing and allowed him to work with smaller ensembles. Traditionally, a film would involve a thousand people, but now, he reckons, he can get the same results with only 10. He makes the analogy: “I was never drawn to the idea of a big band. I like a quartet or trios.”
His Royal Opera House event will pull these many threads together. Spread over eight spaces, there will be simultaneous showings of live music, artworks, films and performance which visitors can drop in on at will. Matthew Herbert and his big band will debut their latest work, one Pig, the People Band are resident, Phil Minton and Peter King will perform, and there will be a big orchestral finale. With references to fashion and politics and films ranging from Jean-Luc Godard to Arthur Penn, it reminded me of the 1960s experimental London club the Arts Lab, but on a grander scale. his ROH event is in part a homage, Figgis agreed. “I’d like to open a club. the scene really needs something like that.”
Mike Hobart is the FT’s jazz critic. ‘Just tell the Truth’, Deloitte Ignite 2011, is curated by Mike Figgis and runs from September 2-4 at the Royal Opera House. roh.org.uk/deloitteignite
I had searched for quite a while to find an anthology on newer musical theatre rep.
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